Thank you for the time you took to respond. I understand the basic tenets of your view, although I think that logical necessity is missing from all of the metaphysical options, and pragmatic efficiency and intersubjective agreement favours constant external objects; I think there’s a mangling of the use of the word “imagine”. But that wasn’t my point. My point is:
It’s stated as a logical requisite, but I don’t see any requirement to accept it… could you elucidate? It’s just… I don’t buy it. As I see it, certain chemicals can affect and even create perception/experience, for example.
I don’t follow how “act of experiencing” can be a substance. You have a verb/process, and a noun. It seems to be a category error.
Similarly:
Does an object give of its very substance to form a shadow? Or is there no relationship besides chance between the two?
I know I have a television in the next room. I’m not experiencing it now. If you don’t think I know that, then I don’t think you should use the “know” that I highlighted above, or the following perfect tense (has been… experienced). If I do know that, then memory plays some role in things; in which case, how far removed are we from continuous objects?
We all make predictions all the time, thousands of times a day, using the “rule of thumb” of constant external objects. The computer that you use to communicate on works (perhaps I should say ‘nominally’) using abstracted theories of physical matter, while none of its transistors are observed - millions of unobservable, unexperienced operations take place each second just for you to read this. I hope it’s worth it Given the remarkable predictive power that it affords us, what reason do we have not to accept it? Ultimately, the substance of experience will turn out to be identical to the substance of matter, except with a different name. I suppose if you’re going for panpsychism, that’s an angle.
This seems like an appeal to common sense (as it is embedded in language). Perhaps we made some ontological booboos when we set up language OR when we started taking language as describing ontology rather than some ad hoc thing that elicited certain processes.
Not too soon after work do I reply, eh? Got home, then became obsessed with design for cover of Berkeylian Realms Part One, Conclusion (Chapter 3).
[b]I would say that the communication in our imagination is caused in the first place by collocation, or the coming together (through Frederick Hayek’s polycentric order or through some teleological, either conscious or unconscious, polycentric order?) of smaller elements to form one larger object or entity. I would think that collocation, in your paradigm of external to internal passage of communication (in which the external world communicates what’s in it to the internal world of the experiencer), gives us the stuff in the external world that’s being communicated to the experiencer. This is what I meant. Thus there is jigsaw-ism (I like that better than my previous “jigsaw-puzzle-ism” )even in the external world of the source of info. With this collocation not applicable, I think, at some basic level.
I believe what you mean by all this is that our experiences are what they are because they are messages, so to speak, received by the experiencer by the external world, such that by nature we are mirrors of the larger world outside our current experience, and our current experience is a true (more or less) reflection of the nature of that world. We communicate with the external world in the sense that it sends us ‘pictures’ of what its really like in the symbology of forces and moving electrons, until those moving electrons (impelled by force) reaches that part of the brain that mimics the symbolic info. Amazingly, the brain is set up statistically and probabilistically with neurons and synaptic connection that just happen to be able to visually mimic or represent the objects existing in the external world. No brain, no communication.
It’s an elegant theory to be sure, but I still say that we are simply looking at ourselves (as we have only ourselves as a base for knowledge of the external world) and simply “making it so” that the content of visual perception must be a reflection of the appearance and behavior of the external world. But this reflection must be by chance if the very existence of visual perception is not derived from the external world itself. We only experience our experience, and it must come from somewhere if it did not magically pop into existence ex nihilo. The brain, a mass of cells within a bony skull, is ultimately mere symbology, and if it somehow contains experience (in phenomenalism this is easier to envision and accept) the a priori relationship between neurons and conscious experience is representationism: neural circuits giving rise to specific experiences must exist before the experience and represent or symbolize the experience in neural/synaptic form (the function of the neural circuit, reduced to the forced motion of electrons through the structure of every involved neuron, is a given).
In phenomenalism, brain, neurons, electrons, and experiences are composed of the same basic substance, so it is easy to see how neurons can come up with experience in the first place. In Idealism, the brain is merely an symbol of God’s intelligence and may function in the same way it does in Phenomenalism, but is generally thought to be a false machine in that it only appears to give rise to consciousness, when external psychical phenomena actually does the work.
In Non-mentalism (“non-mentalism” in the sense that something is not made out of or is something other than experience or the potential to experience altogether, not “non-mentalism” as that which exists but cannot experience), the relationship between that which lies within the skull and conscious experience requires magic, as the substance making up the brain is not the substance of experience itself.[/b]
[b]But in the end, you’re simply assuming that there is an ‘everything’ shaped like the content of visual perception and that it contains information about itself that can translate into the visual perception of a specific experiencer from that experiencer’s point of view. The only thing we experience is the experiencer (oneself) and the visual perception of something that exists as something seen from the perceiver’s point of view. We do not experience its supposedly external counterpart. However, some, coming to believe that a counterpart exists, create fictions of the existence of the counterpart and a fiction of the necessity for the existence of the counterpart in order for there to be the existence of the experiencer and the experiencer’s visual perception.
Don’t get me wrong: its an elegant theory, but all we have…all we experience is the second part, not the first. We simply come to believe (if we do come to believe) that the second is the first or that the second indicates the first. There is, I believe, a ‘first’ of some kind, and in the interest of Pantheopsychism I am bound to your informational theory in a theological sense, but in practice it is not at all necessary that there be pre-existing, external copies of the content of visual perception in order for visually perceived objects to exist. These can in principle be created by fiat by an external something or state of affairs that looks nothing like visual perception. It may ultimately just come down to collocation, akin to the “just so” collocation or piecing-together of macroscopic everyday objects by disparate energetic particles in physical theory. It is not necessary that there be a pre-existing model to the content of visual experience in order for the content of visual experience to be what it is—unless the model plays a direct role, giving of its own substance, in the very creation of an experiencer and that experiencer’s visual perception of the model, which “reaches in” to “portray” itself within the experiencer.
In the end, this point is (it seems) quite clear: the information that’s ‘out there’, in order to reasonably have anything to do with the mental information ‘in here’ (the experiencer and that which it experiences), must have the same substance as that which is ‘in here’, if it is truly responsible for the existence of the experiencer and that which it experiences. It is ultimately a question of the existence of subjective experience, the existence of the nature of our experience (the seven modes of VAGOTET), and the condition under which subjective experience exists (if it is not magically conjured or randomly pops into existence ex nihilo, it is somehow eternal, and has always existed in some form). Experience must come from somewhere, and there is a reason it takes the shape that it does (in the form of the experiencer and what its currently experiencing at a particular moment in time). This means that the substance of experience, if it does not emerge or is created ex nihilo (wholly without the use of any pre-existing material or substance) must exist before Russellian “logical constructions of sense-data, feeling, and thought” (aka an experiencer and its current experience) in the external world itself, and must make up the structure of the external world. There is the question of third-party experience, which you raised before. One knows that oneself exists, and that one is an experiencer that has experiences, with visual experience being something that appears to oneself and appears only in the form of how it is to your point of view. But:
(i) Does an external counterpart to your visual experience exist (such that, in principle, it does not require your looking at it to exist in the first place, and continues to exist when you’re no longer looking at it)?
(ii) If it does, does it experience?
(iii) If panpsychism (in which everything experiences, even if it is not a person) is false, then it does not.
(iv) If it does not experience, is it then non-mental?
(v) Does something have to experience in order to be mental?
In the end, says the Idealist, this assumes that there is something that is not a person in the first place, as that which is not a person is not a part of the person and exists separate from the person and its experiences (it must, if it can exist in the complete absence of persons without need for disconnection from the person!). But if only persons (with the experiences of those persons coming from or being a direct adjunct of the person) exists (with the substance of an infinite, fundamental person forming the ‘external’ warehouse that supplies the experiences of internal ‘micro’ persons), then there is no such thing as non-mentality, and objects of perception do not have independent existence, but are aspects of experiencers. However, there is a quasi-non-mentality in the sense that objects of perception do not have their own experiences because they are ultimately phantasmic extensions of the experiencer, but this is just to say that non-person experience simply does not exist because there simply does not exist anything save persons. [/b]
I used to think that overall, God has a purpose designed into us and that we do run on deliberate puppet strings, but in recent years the idea that we reflect (positively or negatively) rather than are deliberately controlled by God seems to have taken hold. Following Berkeley (inadvertently), I think that we are walking, talking, positive or negative symbols of God and God’s nature, and that we are autonomously (a quasi-puppetry here in the form of the fundamental mechanics of our being) ‘made’ so to speak, to be these symbols, and it is the only thing we can do. Thus we reflect God’s intelligence (in the form of our own intelligence and in the regularities and relative predictabilities in nature), God’s morality (in the form of our own morality or internal move to generate and foster positive experience and emotion) and God’s negativity or what it is to be the opposite of God (God’s Jungian Shadow in the form of or propensity and will to generate and foster negative experience and emotion, and the world’s generation of negative experience by quasi-unthinking mechanics). God, in this sense, is the background nature and mechanic of our being that, by fiat, sets the conditions. Our so-called ‘self-development’ is actually a process of being an internal barometer of God’s evolution from Jungian Shadow to pure Superego.
[b]Well its a safe bet that the imagination is collocated or pieced together to form what it is, at the very least (if not, it popped wholly into existence ex nihilo). But as for it being informed by something outside itself, in the sense that it appears as it does because of the appearance of that which informs it? In principle, this may not necessarily be so: it could have simply formed, collocated, out of something and by something that’s nothing like it apparitionally. This is never out of the question. And we do not experience information transfer between the external world and ourselves because we only experience ourselves, not the external world. We only experience the ‘message’ that is received, not the giver of the message (Although we may confuse the giver of the message for the message, confuse the external world for ourselves. I get into this in the Conclusion of Part One of the Berkeylian Realms series). Thus, what we make of ourselves and what lies outside ourselves is, and must be, operationally just a matter of our imagination. We can’t really know that our imagination and our knowledge of the external world is informed to us by the external world—we just believe it is. Heck, it may be, but from our vantage point we only believe in things that may not be true in the objective. We only know (through Russellian immediate acquaintance) of the existence of one’s own experience and oneself. We only experience one’s own experience and oneself. What’s going on outside ourselves is speculation. One only believes that one is informed by God or the world outside oneself (in the absence of gods).
Empiricism (the belief that knowledge is derived only from experience) v.s. Innatism (the belief that some knowledge is innate, or given from above: revelatory knowledge and such), I suppose. I believe in revelatory knowledge, being theist, but I play devils advocate for Empiricism as something that could be in principle if not in practice. I do not deny your ontology of external informing the internal in its structure: I simply deny that this information is, or worse must be, in the form of the content of visual perception, and that this must be in order for the content of visual perception to exist as it does.[/b]
Not if, by chance, the only things that exist are persons. It’s not a matter of what we can do or what we can imagine. Its a matter of what actually manages to exist, despite what we can imagine, or not. It may be that there are nothing but persons, and that before there were ‘others’ there was the one fundamental person. Or there have always been persons within the fundamental person, though not human. Or there may be un-experienced things. But the un-experienced, if it is not composed of the same substance of the experience of persons, cannot rationally play a role in the experience of persons, as it substantially is not experience or the act of experiencing at all. If it exists, we can say nothing about it, precisely because we do not experience it at all and it has nothing to do with experience itself.
I suppose so. But we cannot say what that point of experience is actually like. It cannot inform us, being not experience itself.
[b]Concise and to the point. Like it.
Very good discussion. Lots of things still to consider, but at the end of it we must start with ourselves, because the only thing we experience is ourselves.
It’s an appeal to meaning. If language is insufficient, explain why, but don’t use it knowing it’s broken and leave everyone else to just fill in the gaps. If you prefer that approach, I can only suggest you grape fiduciary through cat severaltimes to up. You know what I mean.
Seriously, we all manage to communicate. With abstract nouns, I can parse such a phrase - “love is the act of giving freely”, “respect is the act of empathising with another as an equal”, such things. With a concrete noun, that doesn’t work: “my shoes are the act of walking to the shops” “cats are the act of contempt for humans”. So I’m asking clarification, because as it stands it seems senseless to me. And if you can’t explain precisely what pg means without heavy caveats on “my interpretation” and so forth, it might indicate the same for you.
Occam’s razor appeals to the -explanation- with the fewest entities/classes, not the description. Why would physicists bother with neutrinos, bosons and quantum mechanics when “god did it” is simpler? Because we can do nothing with the latter.
If it appears there’s a continuous external reality and we can live by that, what is conjuring these impressions each time we return to a room and find it the same? Is a Berkelian Thinker (for example) that intercedes on every moment of our waking lives, tracking the aggregate of our expectations and predictions and supplying us with the appropriate experiences -really- more parsimonious than a physical universe?
[b]But constant external objects, if they exist, are not the same thing as experienced objects (visual experience, as there are no external analogs for non-visual experiences, with non-visual experiences being subjective reactions to rather than visual depictions of external objects), because experienced objects cease to exist when they are not experienced and external objects, if they exist, exist regardless of experience or subjects of experience.
If this is true, then the pragmatic efficiency, let alone intersubjective agreement (as this can be nothing but multiple experiencers having relatively similar experiences, without the necessity for the existence of external objects) of experience based on the presence of external objects begs a causal relation between the external object and the experience ‘of’ the object. They are two different things, and the expediency of the existence of the second (the experience ‘of’ the object) depends somehow not just upon the existence but the speed with which the first (the external object) creates a mental copy of itself within an experiencer.
But how does it do this? In common methodology of the process of perception, the distal object (the external object) cannot fit (non-destructively) inside the skull (if it is larger than a skull) and brain, and the percept (a particular person’s visual experience of a thing it believes to be the distal object (Direct Realism) or a mental representation or simulation of the object (Indirect Realism) is believed to “come from” or “out of” neurons—so the external object does not directly create the percept: according to psychophysicalism, neurons within the skull do that.
But if Phenomenalism and Idealism are false, and external objects are made out of something that is not experience nor the act of experiencing at all, then it cannot use its own substance as the source of something it substantially and essentially is not. It cannot pull experience out of or from itself, as experience is not to be found before the fact within itself. The existence of subjective experience must be explained. If it does not magically pop into existence ex nihilo, then it must pre-exist in some form before it is the actual personal experience of a particular person. If external objects are made out of something that cannot also form the personal experience of a particular person, then there is no logical connection between the external object and the experience of a person. For one thing, we cannot experience external things: we can only believe they exist (even if in truth they do not).[/b]
As stated above, the very existence of experience, or of experiencing, must be explained. If it does not pop into existence (origination or existence ex nihilo), or if it is not created wholly without the use of pre-existing material and substance (creation ex nihilo), then it eternally exists. But it arguably cannot be created by non-experience, as non-experience is simply that which is not experience nor experiencing itself. Non-experience, or non-mentality (as “mentality” in the philosophy of mind is not just “thought”, but subjective experience per se) cannot produce that which is not itself (experience) from itself, as experience (which exists by being experienced) is not a pre-existing part of non-experience or non-mentality. They are two separate things.
The chemicals are made up of experience, as they are experienced. We do not and cannot experience chemicals made up of non-experience, so the chemicals that we know affect and ‘create’ perception and experience are experiential in substance. We do nothing but experience, and we are composed of nothing but experience, and the objects of perception are made up of the experience of the subject. We have no experience of the opposite of experience, but somehow believe that it exists. It’s paradoxical. We can’t experience it, yet incredulously claim we know it exists or that we know what its qualities are like based on something it is not: experience.
The term: ‘the substance of the act of experiencing’ is simply a play on ‘the substance of experience’. The act of experiencing, or ‘experiencing’ is a verb, as something that one actively does, but it is in a sense a thing: the act of experiencing is simply experience itself, and it is a substance in the sense that it is a palpable thing. In fact, it is the only thing that is known through experience to exist, as all ‘substances’ ( wood, steel, cloth, etc.) are ultimately experiences.
Interesting analogy. The object, however, does not give of its substance to form its shadow, as a shadow is simply an area, external to the object, where light cannot reach because the area is obstructed by the object. The shadow does not “come from” or “out of” the object: it is an aspect of the area behind the object . The relationship between an object and its shadow does not exist by chance, but the methodology of that relationship is not the same as the implied methodology of the relationship between an external model and the percept. The external model is supposedly mimicked apparitionally by the percept whereas a shadow is an outline of the object, and the external model, if the appearance of the percept and its similarity to the external model (as we could perceive the external model directly) is not a matter of random chance, should play a direct role in the very existence of the percept beyond just a remote flipping of the force switch between the external world and the central nervous system. In the case of the latter, the very relationship between the external model and the percept hinges (in psychophysicalism) upon the pre-existence and pre-existing potential for performance of something within a skull, not the external model itself.
[b]The point is not that you must constantly experience a thing in order to know that it exists. I am not using the term “know” in this sense or for this reason. The point is that that which is we known to exist independent of belief and speculation (with such belief and speculation taking the place of sensory experience due to the inability to sensorially experience that which the person believes exists) is known to exist only because it has been experienced. You know the television exists, regardless of whether or not you experience it in the future, because you experienced it in the first place.
There is primary (visual) perception (as I am using the terms) in the sense of directly experiencing something by standing next to it and looking at it (e.g. one may have primary perception of the Grand Canyon, or the Taj Mahal, etc.) and there is secondary perception, or the experience of something second-hand, through television, photographs, or even abstractly in the form of a pencil drawing of the object. There is a tertiary perception, or cognitive perception, in the formation of a mental image or imagination of the object in the absence of primary and secondary perception or if the concept is invisible or inconceivable, their is at least tertiary auditory perception of the concept by hearing a word that refers to the concept or a weaker form of secondary perception in terms of seeing the word on a piece of paper, in a book, or on a computer monitor. Presumably, we come to know of the existence of something through primary, secondary, and tertiary perception or we simply do not know that a particular concept or object exists at all, even if it objectively does. If something is not primarily, secondarily, or tertiararily (if that is a word) perceived, it simply is something that never comes into the mind at all. Knowledge, then, begins not only with those things that are directly experienced (or as Russell might have put it: immediately acquainted) but with those things that come to mind.
I use the word: “know” in conjunction with “existence” only in terms of the existence of primary, secondary, and tertiary perception and how these three together consitute knowledge itself.[/b]
[b]But these transitors, if they exist, would only be experiential transitors (phenomenal transistors) made up of the substance of someone’s experience of them. We do not and cannot know if they actually exist independent of experience. It is quite reasonable that they could (with this reasonableness applying only to phenomenalism and reflective idealism), but it may be that objectively they do not, and only form from disparate psychic stuff in the form of the experienced transistors and the person staring at them (they come as a set). Or they may exist when we are not looking at them in someone else’s mind (note to Quetzalcoat: the god-matrix again). The salient point is that they do not necessarily require external analogs of themselves in order to exist, precisely because the external analogs are not the experiential transistors.
The existence of the first (the percept) is caused by a process independent of and regardless of the existence of the second (the external object, if it exists), particularly if the second does not or cannot use part of itself to form the first. If the substance of matter is in fact nothing but the substance of experience with a different name (rather than the reverse, which, if matter is held to be non-mental, is impossible)—then and only then can it rationally be said to create or have anything to do with the existence of experience at all. If it is something that is not experience (qua experience itself) and as such cannot be used to form any experience, then it is not experienced (i.e. it is unavailable to primary and secondary perception, and exists only in tertiary perception as letters strung into particular words or terms). If it is not experience nor made out of the substance of experience, it cannot be known (although it can be believed) to exist at all (as we only know of existence through experience and with experience)—much less can it be said to matter (no pun intended) in the content and nature of our experience.
The only defensible position, in insistence that there be external models or analogs of the content of visual perception is not panpsychism but phenomenalism, as noted by Moreno.
So there’s so kind of lego building going on where by chance the blocks form into houses, people and vehicles. Then that is also going on in everyone else’s mind too. Then because there are only minds within a mind, the shapes naturally correlate.
I do think that minds can produce info and concepts [lego blocks], but to understand an external world they would require instruments, which enable our collocative reasoning to correlate.
So now it just comes down to weather or not an external world exists. If it does then you’ll probably need to re-read/reply to all the posts lol.
Does reality exist? Is there only one thing in reality? Only the first part.
If only god then what are we, god or aspects of god, or don’t we exist? If we do then there’s more than one in the whole.
If god is one thing then it is empty and infinite, there are no thoughts going on in that, no instances of anything other than the one thing. NO VARIATION!
The collocation going on in our mind cannot exist.
If reality is multiple, ~ even if that’s merely forms of the one, then there are instances of separateness [the first and second part] which require they are in a third party ~ a world of some kind!
i.e. where we have 2 existing in 1 add them together and there is a 3rd, the whole which encompasses the two.
Yes it is in the 3rd [the world or shared].
No, unless its another experiencer, but even then its experience would not be in mine.
See above.
Yes. I got a feeling I just said something wrong
Well its true that we only experience what we experience, yes, the rest is out there to debate further. E.g. as my experience is entire [or the entirety], why am I not the god-matrix? Are we all gods? Is the god-matrix a part of mine and you matrixes?
[b]Looking at things from the level of what happens to exist (even imaginatively) versus what does not, it may be that the shapes, or general content of everyone’s mind (including God’s) are similar because there are only certain types of info that exist, and they manifest and repeat, relatively, in everyone’s mind. The same “tokens”, pre-cut before the fact of experience in the jigsaw pieces of everyone’s particular perspective (including God’s), happens by chance to exist and to express the paradigms of God/man mind. All the jigsaw portraits, so to speak, are relatively alike (or refer to the same corner or point of relative in the form of points prepared to make every distinct point of view) and bespeak the same concepts because only the jigsaw pieces making up these shared concepts and experiences (as well as unshared experiences that are, following John Stuart Mill, nevertheless “possibilities of experience” (for others)) exist, and they exist (by chance) in such a way that they only combine to give rise to God/man experience.
Even in the absence of a God or gods, one need only study existence from our perspective (one ultimately has no choice): our experiences, such as we actually have them, are “circumscribed” in the sense that we have only a certain type of sensorially/emotionally/cognitively amalgamative experience at a particular moment in time, with these amalgamations evolving through time to form a sequence or chain of different experiences blended together in a particular narrative.
One wonders why, bogus invocation of physical particles aside, why this narrative is the one that managed to exist in lieu of all others, and why the narrative of experience is so similar to everyone else’s. In the simplest way, if our experiences are indeed primordially quantized in such a way as to necessitate assimilation or collocation into the experiences of real persons, then it may be that only the jigsaw puzzle pieces forming actual individuals exist, regardless of whether or not God (or any other non-human anthropomorphic mind) is included in the set.[/b]
Sure, our minds require some type of bridge into the external world, if the external world is the material reservoir for our minds and experience. My only argument is that the instruments, the bridge, and the personal mind and external world itself can only rationally be made up of the same basic substance. Again, if the substance of one thing is simply not that making up another, two things have no logical or rational creative relation: something cannot take from itself that which it essentially and substantially is not, as the substance and essence of the other is not found at all within the first.
I believe in the existence of an external world. I just don’t believe in the existence of non-mentality or non-experience (That is, non-experience as a third person substance: the idea of non-experience in the first person is a daunting problem to the Idealist, but the Idealist can simply say that the only thing that happens to exist are persons, and their “exteroceptive” experience is merely an extension of themselves [albeit supplied by the material of the external world, even though in the very concept “supplied by the material of the external world” there lurks (gulp!) the spectre of first-person non-experience] as there is no non-person object at all: objects are simply experiences relative to each person in the “Continuum” (a play on the Q Continuum in Star Trek TNG).
Well, whatever the semantics one may apply to the term: ‘existence’. I think one should forsake all others and glare at the existence of oneself and the nature of that existence: the fact that it does nothing but subjectively experience (regardless of what is experienced). Taking this reality as primordial (as the fundamental basis of empirical knowledge), I’d say that we actually, in reality, only experience the ‘second part’: oneself and one’s immediate experiences.
[b]I would say we are microscopic aspects and anti-aspects of God (imaginative exercises, to God—although serious exercises to his alter, Christ (!) of what it is to be the oppose of God, using the materials and existential symbols available to depict such opposition), or living ideas believing themselves (if they believe so) to be separate from the macro-being but actually needing the material of the mind of the macro in order to exist and continue having one’s own mind.
In God we are akin, I think, to the imaginary people we conjure within our minds when reading a novel or creating one. These individuals are made up of thought (in our example), but they may, possibly, not be philosopher’s zombies at all! Even if they exist within us, they may, unbeknownst to us, have their own sub-dimensional (box within a box) mentality! The characters of Stephen King, for example, still within his mind (having not yet made it to paper or computer monitor), may have life all their own with the horror writer’s mind, and they may continue to exist in his subconscious or unconscious mind (although everything is causally connected in the end), experiencing new things, while the conscious mind of the writer has moved on.[/b]
While we can imagine God to be anything (i.e. God the orange on my counter or God=existence qua existence itself), if God is man writ the size of infinity, then you bet there is “just so” variation that just happens to exist in the potential and actual forms of the concepts that we, being the (positive and negative) offspring of God, also carry within ourselves.
In Pantheopsyhism and Berkeley’s proto-Pantheopsychism? Sure. Although these externals are just ideas within an external mind. Independent of Pantheo? Perhaps…or perhaps not. I can’t, and won’t, say that it is definitely one way or the other given that I cannot possibly know (as I do not and cannot experience its truth, and I do not claim that imagination is knowledge or revealed knowledge: if all imagination were knowledge, we’d really need an Omniverse large enough to contain a real-world Lord of the Rings, the zombie worlds of George Romero, and every single sci-fi and comic story ever told, among other things) that through either Russellian immediate acquaintance or inference.
I would say that the experience of another experiencer is not mine per se, and certainly not like mine in quality, but it is not out of the question that the other is somehow within me, such that it uses the material of my mind for its own, even if those internal experiences do not appear in my own conscious macroexperience. In the end, it may come down to the presence or absence of the derivation of one mind from a pre-existing one.
[b]I don’t know. You could be the god-matrix. I could be the god-matrix. Or we could all actually be gods. Or we could be a part of a real, external God. It all comes down to what one is convinced is true, and if this thing, whatever it is, is outside of oneself and the continuum of all of one’s experiences, then it must be taken on faith. The important thing, I think, is that it should at least be logically possible. Only then can one sleep the sleep of the just.
Side note: I’m going to push the peddle to the floor in cranking out Berkeylian Realms Part I Chapter Three—Conclusion to Part One. This means, me brothers, that my responses to your posts in this thread may be delayed, but I will respond to them as honor demands. Once again (if I haven’t done this before) thank you all for your input. It’s great to see good, no-nonsense philosophy, absent esoteric and obscure gobbledegook, obfuscation, and wilful ignorance. Good job everyone.
Given the remarkable predictive power that it affords us, what reason do we have not to accept it? Ultimately, the substance of experience will turn out to be identical to the substance of matter, except with a different name. I suppose if you’re going for panpsychism, that’s an angle.
)even in the external world of the source of info. With this collocation not applicable, I think, at some basic level.
